Alex Singleton is part of the Daily Telegraph's leader-writing team and is a contributing editor at the Sunday Telegraph. You can visit his personal site and follow him on Twitter.

The Tea Party Republicans are putting our liberal Tories to shame

Cecil Rhodes, the founder of DeBeers and the state of Rhodesia (Photo: Corbis)

“To be born an Englishman,” Cecil Rhodes once claimed, “is to win first prize in the lottery of life.” These days, Mark Steyn says the prize goes to Americans, and whenever I think of Westminster, I can't help thinking he might be on to something.

Our supposedly centre-Right Government supports a plethora of Left-liberal causes (such as EU membership and global warming taxes) and favours a Big Society where – for unclear reasons – government is also big. Across the Pond, however, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives is flowing over with radicalism, voting only last Wednesday to abolish ObamaCare.

So why the big difference? Well, our lack of open primaries has effectively allowed party machines to disenfranchise their grassroots supporters. Take the case of foreign aid. The high level of expenditure on "international development" irritates voters, especially Tories. What's more, there is overwhelming evidence that it suppresses poor countries' economic growth. Yet our Conservative-led Coalition is determined to increase it. Massively.

The Republicans aren’t so naive. Their Republican Study Committee (a policy unit serving 165 Republicans in the House) has a plan to cut waste in USAID’s budget. It says that $1.39 billion could be saved. The total budget, by the way, is $1.65 billion.

Now I can’t see our Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, agreeing to a similar proposal here. His job is to prevent the do-gooders and busybodies at Christian Aid and the World Development Movement – who, frankly, are unlikely to ever vote Tory - from criticising the Government. But at over £9 billion a year, Britain's aid budget is an expensive bit of appeasement. If Mitchell stood in an open primary – like Republican candidates have to – with his brand of global socialism, he’d quickly lose his seat.

Maybe, by the middle of this decade, a rebellion among the sounder backbench Tories will cause a decent leader who believes in capitalism to be installed. But if we want a long-term solution to our lacklustre politics, we need to remove the power to chose candidates from the latte liberals in Conservative Campaign Headquarters – and permanently.